Apple tops Google as the most valuable brand

LONDON: Apple has usurped Google as the world’s most valuable brand, said an annual brands study by global agency Miillward Brown.

The iPhone maker, now worth $153 billion, overtook Microsoft last year to become the world’s most valuable technology company due to its coveted comsumer goods portfolio. Apple’s victory has ended Google’s four-year reign as the internet search leader, the brands study added.

Peter Walshe, global brands director of Millward Brown, says Apple’s meticulous attention to detail, along with an increasing presence of its gadgets in corporate environments, have allowed it to behave differently from other consumer-electronics makers.

“Apple is breaking the rules in terms of its pricing model,” he told Reuters by telephone. “It’s doing what luxury brands do, where the higher price the brand is, the more it seems to underpin and reinforce the desire. Obviously, it has to be allied to great products and a great experience, and Apple has nurtured that.”

Of the top 10 brands in Monday’s report, six were technology and telecoms companies: Google at number two, IBM at number three, Microsoft at number five, AT&T at number seven and China Mobile at number nine.

McDonald’s rose two places to number four, as fast food became the fastest-growing category, Coca-Cola slipped one place to number six, Marlboro was also down one to number eight, and General Electric was number 10.

Walshe said demand from China was a major factor in the rise of fast-food brands. “The Chinese have been discovering fast food and it’s such a vast market — Starbucks, McDonald’s… and pizza has hit China,” he said.

“The way McDonald’s has reinvented itself, adapted its menus, added healthy options, expanding the times of day it can be visited, for example oatmeal for breakfast… that allied with growth in developing markets has really helped that brand.”

Nineteen of the top 100 brands came from emerging markets, up from 13 last year.

Facebook entered the top 100 at number 35 with a brand valued at $19.1 billion, while Chinese search engine Baidu rose to number 29 from 46.

Toyota reclaimed its position as the world’s most valuable car brand, as it recovered from a bungled 2010 product recall. The survey was carried out before the March earthquake that caused massive disruption to Japanese supply chains.

Source: www.firstpost.com

Google launches Transliteration !! NOT TRANSALTE

It’s not easy for everybody to write in regional languages, specifically when we going for the training and workshop, it’s found troublesome for the participants to write in their languages and hence they use to write like “mera bharat mahan” rather using Hindi fonts and type in Hindi.

Now Google offers free utility in which you can write like “mera bharat mahan” and the feature transliterate(NOT TRANSLATE) it to the Hindi fonts.

The beauty is you can copy paste it in Word, PowerPoint or other software and easily.

Google Transliteration IME is an input method editor which allows users to enter text in one of the supported languages using a roman keyboard. Users can type a word the way it sounds using Latin characters and Google Transliteration IME will convert the word to its native script. Note that this is not the same as translation -- it is the sound of the words that is converted from one alphabet to the other, not their meaning. Converted content will always be in Unicode.

Google Transliteration IME is currently available for 19 different languages -Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya and Urdu.

Must try at.

http://www.google.com/transliterate/

Choose the language you would like to type in.

Please note:- it takes few seconds to convert the English words in to the language of the choice (depending on the speed of internet), but it will work.

Visit the Alps with Google Earth

Using Google Earth to visualize real-life experiences is becoming a more and more popular idea. As the imagery in Google Earth continues to improve, these experiences become even better.

Click Here to start cycling through Alps right now

They have built hundreds of Google Earth tours of various cycling routes in the Alps, augmented with photos and videos for many of them.

Here is a snapshot from one of the tours:

To learn more, here is a brief video overview of how their site works:

To try it for yourself, just head over to their site and dive in. Right-click on any pass and choose "3D Tour" to watch a tour of it in Google Earth, or you can jump directly to the col de liseran tour to see it in action.